Monday, 5 January 2015

Building the Saracen Army part 3

Just before Xmas I shared with you my progress on the
Saracen army I was building. I am now delighted to report that a further 80
plastic Gripping Beast Arabs are now painted and have been added to the
infantry ranks. This brings the total number of infantry to about 240 figures.
The final total may well be closer to 300 by the time I have added a few personalities and added some extra bits and bobs.

If you want to start to read this project from the beginning head here

I have been a little more ambitious with these adding stripes and coloured hemlines !

I haven’t neglected the cavalry. I think I mentioned in my
last post that I intended using a range of manufacturers to build this rather
eclectic force. Including HAT, Fire Forge, Black Tree, and Musketeer to name a fewThe latest additions are 24 Fire Forge Mongol horsemen who have
now been transformed into an arab looking force using all those spare Gripping
Beast heads. I have based and primed these Of course these guys deserve a coat of paint and this will be
applied shortly.

24 Fire Forge Mongols ( to be painted as arabs)

Whilst talking about heads I still needed to chop off those
silly little heads on the HAT figures and replace these with GB arab heads –
thank god I had enough.

I thought a few photos might go down well for others with same thought but had not taken the plunge

Original Gripping Beast spearman

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Gripping Beast head on Fire Forge Mongol Horse

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Gripping Beast head on 28mm HAT Arab

So in summary I can now field almost 100 cavalry
figures (including camels). Even though the riders have not been painted I just had to put them
all out for one big charge !!To put this into scale if you placed one figure behind another the line would stretch for 5 metres

On a final point I saw that Black Tree design were running
another of their fantastic deals so I bought a few Viziers for command units,
another eight crossbows allowing me to field a unit of 16, and some of their
Saracen horsemen from the fantasy range. Sixteen of these guys at around £2.80
each.

Finally I bought a mage on a flying carpet – you never know
when you might need one!

When they arrive I’ll be sure to post some photos...

By my reckoning I have now applied paint to half the army so with a fair wind the end of March is still looking possible, and for those of you fed up with my mediocre painting don't worry a new set of terrain builds are in the 'thinking stage'...

3 comments:

your project is coming along nicely - that's a lot of figures painted but still quite a few left to do! Using the gripping beast heads has made the different ranges jell together well. You might even get this project done ahead of schedule - wow!!!